# What are you currently feeling nostalgic about?



## Murkrow (May 13, 2021)

Nostalgia is such a weird emotion. Is it happy, is it sad? Was the thing you're thinking of even as good as you remember it? But what I do know is that when I get these feelings I want to share it with people. So here's everyone chance: what are you feeling nostalgic about? What triggered it? Is there a specific time frame in which you can place the feelings?

Here is a word that might be useful. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd published a book called "The Meaning of Liff" which takes UK place names and gives them a definition which don't currently have a word. One of the first alphabetically is "Aberystwyth", which they define as "A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for."

Here's what compelled me to make this thread:
People who follow me in the grr thread know I like ragging on social media. I miss back when forums like this were more active, as well as tumblr. (Imagine what social media would be like if the focus was on community rather than individuals. If people created things out of passion rather than chasing influencer clout!)

And recently I decided to check on how the My Little Pony fandom was doing, because I realised they seemed to have just gone silent in the last couple of years, after taking the internet by storm in 2010/11. It's sad to see so many deleted youtube videos, 404ed websites, blogs not been updated since 2014, and missing tumblr blogs, even the ones I never followed and ones that were created after I stopped following the fandom. An odd sense of loss.

Finally, today I tried playing TF2 for the first time in years. The UI has changed but it's still the same game fundamentally. The combination of MLP and TF2 and thinking about what made tumblr and forums great for fandom just conjures such raw 2011 feelings in me. It's so hard to describe!


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## IndigoClaudia (May 13, 2021)

Aberystwyth is my discord username for no reason other than the fact that i thought i sounded cool, but now i'm extra glad i chose that username!

EDIT: Oh, i'm nostalgic for specific time periods in my life, mostly. Spring of 2020 makes me really nostalgic, when i think about it.


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## Murkrow (May 13, 2021)

2020 is an odd year to be nostalgic about!

I would say it's too soon, but I've definitely felt nostalgic about things that haven't long passed. I'm pretty sure I started getting the feels listening to gen 6 Pokémon music as soon as 2016, _before _I started feeling nostalgic about gens 4 or 5.


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## IndigoClaudia (May 13, 2021)

In my defense, time passes weird in a pandemic


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## Kung Fu Ferret (May 14, 2021)

The song "Be Prepared" from the 1994 classic Disney animated movie "The Lion King"


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## Sanqui (Sep 29, 2021)

Forums are an easy one.  Social media's just not the same, and sometimes it feels like we've all collectively lost the ability to write not even long, but medium form text really.

I have to say though, now you got me thinking.  Although I feel wistful for many things from my past, I'm hard pressed to call it straight up nostalgia.  I *remember* what nostalgia feels like, for instance, I remember how listening to certain music would bring back a wave of memories.  But even if I try to actively avoid listening to music that was nostalgic these days so it wouldn't get watered down, it just doesn't feel the same lately.  Nonetheless, I know there's many things to rediscover...


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## LadyJirachu (Oct 29, 2021)

Forums a bit. Something about posting on them is comforting nowadays. Plus the Hello Kitty avatars seem to add to that feel I seem to have at the moment xD


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## Storm Earth and Fire (Feb 19, 2022)

By the mid 2010s the internet consolidated around the enormous pillars we're all familiar with, Twitter, tiktok, reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and such, which sucked everyone up and ended what now seems like a real wild west period of the internet, when people congregated around personal websites, blogs, forums, and instant messengers. I think anyone who was extremely online up until that time would miss it. The massive, all-encompassing nature of the aggregated sites kinda kills off attention spans. It's hard to form bonds. I know it gets a lot of shit, but reddit comes close at times. Any sufficiently general subreddit turns into what we stereotype reddit as, but a lot of small, specific subreddits definitely get that feel sometimes.

What hits me harder with nostalgia is going to an old school site. A few months ago I found out TRsRockin.com is still up, albeit mirrored by someone else. There are a few broken links, but the core of the site is intact. The internet used to be filled with these sorts of sites, with free or cheap hosting. I've been listening to a series of podcasts about the Final Fantasy VII house, which is a horrific story, but the way everyone got sucked into it in the early to mid 2000s through finding personal fan sites and instant messaging is incredibly nostalgic.

Anyhow, trying to find out what TR Rose is up to nowadays kicked off more nostalgia. Turns out she's also in Texas and actually went to some of the same anime conventions I went to before the pandemic. She's still active and cosplaying with her husband and son. I want to say hi if I ever run into them at a con, just have to make sure I don't come off as creepy. Back to the point, anime conventions, wow, being taken out for over a year and a half hurt. Going back was weird, the first was fine, just a low key affair, but the two afterwards, I tried to party hard and wow I guess 30 is the hill on that. My friends felt the same way. Who knows, maybe getting back to a regular schedule will get us used to it, but damn.

I dunno when I'll show up again, but it felt good to be here again.


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## Murkrow (Feb 20, 2022)

Storm Earth and Fire said:


> By the mid 2010s the internet consolidated around the enormous pillars we're all familiar with, Twitter, tiktok, reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and such, which sucked everyone up and ended what now seems like a real wild west period of the internet, when people congregated around personal websites, blogs, forums, and instant messengers. I think anyone who was extremely online up until that time would miss it. The massive, all-encompassing nature of the aggregated sites kinda kills off attention spans. It's hard to form bonds. I know it gets a lot of shit, but reddit comes close at times. Any sufficiently general subreddit turns into what we stereotype reddit as, but a lot of small, specific subreddits definitely get that feel sometimes.


Reddit is a bit better but it still suffers from a few issues. You can have more than one account, but generally people don't do that. So you have the same account to post in the pokemon subreddit as the zelda ones. It's more convenient to have one account for all (same thing for being in multiple discord servers), but it's also harder to be pseudoanonymous? It's annoying that people can go through your post history and try to use it against you.
And single topics usually end up with one dominant subreddit. As far as I know there's no smaller subreddits for talking about pokemon - why use one when you can just go to /r/pokemon, for example. But the single subreddits for topics like that are so huge it's impossible for it to be a community.

I know I pretty much started the thread with the same sentiment but I too miss the wild west period of the internet. It's not just attention spans that are being killed but also people's tolerance of "weird" people. Back when the internet was segmented into different websites, if you didn't like the content on a website you could just click off and not go there. You were responsible for curating your own experience. Now, because most content is going to be on one of the giants' sites people instead just immediately jump to "ban this!". I've seen tumblr posts theorise that it's because of infinite scrolling and algorithmically-pushed content, people no longer realise they can curate their own internet experience. Content is served _to_ them by someone/something else rather than something they actively choose to look at.
One example of this could be furries. I know furries have always been an easy target but with the internet going mainstream, you get a lot more people who grew up without the idea of just minding your own business.



> What hits me harder with nostalgia is going to an old school site. A few months ago I found out TRsRockin.com is still up, albeit mirrored by someone else. There are a few broken links, but the core of the site is intact. The internet used to be filled with these sorts of sites, with free or cheap hosting. I've been listening to a series of podcasts about the Final Fantasy VII house, which is a horrific story, but the way everyone got sucked into it in the early to mid 2000s through finding personal fan sites and instant messaging is incredibly nostalgic.


On my old computer I've bookmarked quite a few websites over the years. I went through them recently and it's sad how many of them don't exist or are replaced with "moved to a discord server!". I favourited a post from the forums on glitch city laboratories because I thought the glitch it was talking about was really interesting, and even though I never visited the site before or since I came across that post, I felt like I'd lost something seeing that it had now gone.


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## Storm Earth and Fire (Aug 3, 2022)

Doing some necro because someone on twitter shared a screenshot of Pokemon Crater, where I frequented a forum for the first time ever. Truly a life changing experience that sent me down a path that led me here.



Murkrow said:


> Reddit is a bit better but it still suffers from a few issues. You can have more than one account, but generally people don't do that. So you have the same account to post in the pokemon subreddit as the zelda ones. It's more convenient to have one account for all (same thing for being in multiple discord servers), but it's also harder to be pseudoanonymous? It's annoying that people can go through your post history and try to use it against you.
> And single topics usually end up with one dominant subreddit. As far as I know there's no smaller subreddits for talking about pokemon - why use one when you can just go to /r/pokemon, for example. But the single subreddits for topics like that are so huge it's impossible for it to be a community.


Funny thing, Magic: the Gathering has kind of the opposite problem. The magicTCG subreddit is too general and only really picks up when new sets are coming out or some enormous piece of news drops. Instead the activity is divided among subreddits for Arena, story, formats, deck archetypes, art, custom cards, and more. There's even a surprisingly active rogue subreddit for people who dislike the moderation of magicTCG.

Almost all of my reddit activity is in a single subreddit, but I've definitely thought about being able to see someone's activity everywhere. I think there are pros and cons, because while you could use this to estrange someone from a community, there are occasional cases of instead finding out you have shared interests with someone who seems cool, and maybe you pick up a new internet friend that way. I actually think redditors are much more careful about covering their tracks than people on Twitter.



> I know I pretty much started the thread with the same sentiment but I too miss the wild west period of the internet. It's not just attention spans that are being killed but also people's tolerance of "weird" people. Back when the internet was segmented into different websites, if you didn't like the content on a website you could just click off and not go there. You were responsible for curating your own experience. Now, because most content is going to be on one of the giants' sites people instead just immediately jump to "ban this!". I've seen tumblr posts theorise that it's because of infinite scrolling and algorithmically-pushed content, people no longer realise they can curate their own internet experience. Content is served _to_ them by someone/something else rather than something they actively choose to look at.
> One example of this could be furries. I know furries have always been an easy target but with the internet going mainstream, you get a lot more people who grew up without the idea of just minding your own business.


Yeah that makes a lot of sense. You go to the same place for all sorts of things now, and while you can nudge your content stream with engagement, it's possible to game the algorithms and you're never completely in control of your feed.

An update on TR Rose, I saw her and her family at A-Kon, but totally clammed up and didn't say hi or great website or anything. Luckily I had to wear a mask so none of my friends saw or heard me gasp when I realized who she was. Probably would've cried from the nostalgia hitting me all at once. She was also at AnimeFest but I didn't actually walk around that con much. Her cosplay name is now MeowAbout, she's super good.


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## Kung Fu Ferret (Aug 3, 2022)

Digimon


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## ValyceNegative (Aug 11, 2022)

I could chime in about Web 1.0 nostalgia but Storm Earth And Fire and Murkrow's previous posts convey it so beautifully, I don't think there's anything more that needs to be said: you have mirrored my thoughts exactly and although I'm aware there are personal sites still active (TCODF, ahem) and more opening recently, it's still not as common practice as it was before social media.
Actually I think they even influence a person's approach to virtual conversations, you can clearly distinguish someone who's been jumping from guestbook to guestbook than someone who's only been using social media just by reading their posts. All in all, maybe we would have a less hysterical internet if "web corners" were still the main attraction about the Net.

In particular, the thing Storm Earth And Fire experienced with TRsRockin dot com, I got exactly the same with Suta Raito (now dead, but stored on Web Archive), which I loved surfing back in 2005. I could never meet Kuitsuku in real life (we're continents apart) nor muster up the courage to contact her to say "hey, your old site has been a huge inspiration for me, thanks!" but casually found her Twitter and discovered she's working as a graphic designer, just what she was dreaming back when she had the domain. To me, it brings some kind of closure, I'm glad she found her way.


Something incredibly specific I'm feeling nostalgic about in these couple of days: decorated ceramic and glass tiles. O.o
For some reason I was super into pottery during middle school, but the closest afterclass course my school could provide was glass painting, so I went for that. Their technique lessons were very thorough but never let us experiments with our own designs, they only wanted us to decorate glass with flowers or portraits. So I would go home, purchase thick glass or clay tiles, and paint Pokèmon on them. XD I wish I still had some stored, but I think some ended up breaking and the rest got thrown away in an eventual season cleaning. Maybe I could get some supplies and see if I still remember how to do it.


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## storm (Aug 11, 2022)

there's an ancient and now defunct zelda website that looked so high-effort for late 90's and early 2000's. it had essays and opinion pieces and hosted fanfiction, there were long breakdowns of myths and theories, and a built-in music player that was what singlehandedly got me into the series because I could just play ocarina of time's soundtrack over and over until it would not leave my brain

there's even some song remixes I found there that I never tracked down anywhere else (except on youtube where someone had ripped it from the website)

it was such a crystallized moment of my childhood that I will never experience again. but I'm pleased to see that making personal websites is getting a small resurgence (lots of people in my tumblr sphere are trying out neocities...)


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## Momo(th) (Aug 13, 2022)

I'm definitely feeling nostalgic for Sailor Moon. Honestly you could take the magic powers out of that show and they would still be the best girls, it's so rare to see a totally normal and healthy relationship with a group of women in media, let alone anime lol. The 90's anime is like thirty years old and it remains a breath of fresh air tbh


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## Storm Earth and Fire (Sep 28, 2022)

One of my favorite writers wrote a great article about nostalgia and the erasure of Web 1.0: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner


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## haneko (Sep 29, 2022)

Storm Earth and Fire said:


> One of my favorite writers wrote a great article about nostalgia and the erasure of Web 1.0: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner


That was an amazing read. Thanks for posting about it here! I wish Kate wrote more about the old web.


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